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Chapter 11: The Discipline of Witnessing

Conscious soul,

I am very happy to see you all. I can feel the depth of your longing, of your thirst for the truth. I am seeing it in your eyes and feeling it in your every breath. And as your hearts become inspired to seek the truth, my heart is inspired too - your thirst for truth is also touching me. How delightful it is. How beautiful and juicy all this is! There is nothing sweeter, more beautiful and more beloved on earth than the longing for the truth.

In this unique moment of bliss what shall I say to you? What shall I say to you in this moment of your thirst and waiting? It is only in moments like this that we realize how insignificant, how material and non-transparent words really are. It is only in moments like this that we come to know how meaningless, incapable and powerless words are. When there is nothing really worth saying, words are able to convey it; when there is something worth saying, something profound, they are miserably inadequate. This is only natural because the realization of truth, the experience of bliss and the vision of beauty are so subtle and ethereal that no earthly form can be attributed to them. As soon as one attempts to ascribe an earthly form to them the experiences become dead and meaningless, and then the living experience does not come into our hands alive, it is its corpse that comes. The soul is left behind and whatever the words refer to is no longer the truth.

Then what shall I say? Would it have been better not to have said anything, and for you not to have heard anything at all? How nice it would have been if we had remained silent and quiet, without words, and if you could have woken up to that silence, to that emptiness and become watchful and seen something that truly is. In that case I would have been saved from speaking and you would have been saved from listening, and yet what I had intended to say would have been said without saying it. The truth would have been conveyed, because it is within everyone. The music you are searching for resounds every moment in the depths of your own being. The moments of your thirst for truth, even if they are silent, transform into a state of prayer. Thirsting for God and a silent awaiting is prayer.

What man is seeking is within him. What you have gathered here to ask me about and to know from me is always within you. Neither have you ever lost it, nor can you ever lose it, because it is your very existence, your very being. That alone is the treasure that can never be lost because you yourself are it. But we are all looking for, searching for the very thing that can never be lost. How interesting. What a joke!

I am reminded of a wonderful sermon. I do not recall when or by whom it was given: